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Relativism is the bad faith of the conqueror, who has become secure enough to become a tourist. Cultural relativism is a purely intellectual attitude; it does not inhibit the anthropologist from participating as a professional in his own milieu; on the contrary, it rationalizes that milieu. Relativism is self-critical only in the abstract.
Cultural relativism involves specific epistemological and methodological claims. Whether or not these claims require a specific ethical stance is a matter of debate. This principle should not be confused with moral relativism. Cultural relativism was in part a response to Western ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism may take obvious forms, in which one ...
Cultural relativism as a methodological tool while conducting fieldwork, and as a heuristic tool while analyzing data. Boas argued that in order to understand "what is"—in cultural anthropology, the specific cultural traits (behaviors, beliefs, and symbols)—one had to examine them in their local context.
It was based on the four-field model of anthropology uniting the fields of cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, physical anthropology, and archaeology. It stressed cultural relativism, and separation of biological and cultural determinants of behavior. Boas was widely influential in 20th century anthropology training many students ...
A cultural universal (also called an anthropological universal or human universal) is an element, pattern, trait, or institution that is common to all known human cultures worldwide. Taken together, the whole body of cultural universals is known as the human condition .
Anthropology professor Philip Kilbride, [6] writing for American Anthropologist, praised the book as "momentous, if not dialectically unevitable", and "a compelling case for his call for an 'anthropology of evaluation'", recommending it to students as a companion to Richard Shweder's 1991 Thinking Through Cultures book that by contrast is a defense of postmodernist relativism discouraging ...
Melford Elliot Spiro (April 26, 1920 – October 18, 2014) was an American cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and psychological anthropology.He is known for his critiques of the pillars of contemporary anthropological theory—wholesale cultural determinism, radical cultural relativism, and virtually limitless cultural diversity—and for his emphasis on the theoretical ...
Boas examines beliefs that more accomplished civilizations must have higher intelligence and "discovered little evidence to support them." He then examines the debate on nature versus nurture and finds that the heritability of IQ and the ratio of intellectual giftedness of people within a civilization were "at best a possible, but not a necessary, element determining the degree of advancement ...